- cross-posted to:
- news
- cross-posted to:
- news
On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.
Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.
Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.
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Healthcare: $300b
Infrastructure: $150b
School lunches: $15m
War: $69,420b
Someone who's good at the economy help me budget this. My country is dying.
Split the war budget 50/50, with half going to school lunches and the rest going into guillotines.
Do it.
I will start a free lunch program the next fucking day, I have a whole city full of fucking commies ready to go, I will feed your babies bellies delicious food and I will feed their minds revolutionary proletarian theory. I will teach their parents about Marx and Lenin and Fanon, Luxemburg and Kwame Ture. and we will take this shit over.
Ideologically driven psychos forget how this shit started in the first place. We remember.
Divine rage.
I worked a breakfast grill at a restaurant as a teen and got pretty good at it. I'll make that kid the most perfect breakfast omelette they've ever eaten. And I'll bring the ingredients if we're short.
Also worked @a food pantry not long ago, warehouse work mostly but I got to see some of the parents and kids who showed up, long lines out into the northern cold, every day we were open, just to get a day or two's worth of something to eat.
Anyone who would means-test a kid out of a free school meal, or deny them altogether, is some kind of sociopath monster.
U.S. will give billions of dollars to support genocide, but won't feed it's own children. We've surpassed biblical levels of evil.
Frankly, those children should be pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. I'm sick of second and third graders looking for hand-outs. Entitlement programs like these badly deplete government funds that could be better spent on pork-barrel projects or more munitions that we could export. With any luck, this will be the last year we squander our money feeding the next generation and then we can focus on dismantling those pricey and wasteful public schools.
If feeding kids is a red line then there are no red lines.
Where are we going to get the money to balance the budget? Out of the mouth of babes, apparently.
I just checked with my k-12 schools. Breakfast is about $2 based on level of schooling, while lunch is around $3. At that point, I kind of wonder if it's really worth it collecting the money when it probably does little to collect revenue. Just make it easier for everyone.
I bet there are a bunch of programs where the overhead of means testing and collecting payments is enough that it would actually be cheaper to just make it a universal benefit.
Exactly. There's a lot of infrastructure that goes into payment. It's also another thing that low income parents have to deal with.
Here’s a link to the actual press release which contains links both to the actual budget as well as paragraph by paragraph summaries.
http://rsc-hern.house.gov/media/press-releases/rsc-releases-fy25-budget-proposal-fiscal-sanity-save-america
Thi budget has the word "Biiden" in it more times than it does budget. I also includes the words "woke ideology". Definitely a very serious attempt to look at our spending and not just political bullshit.
The line "Prohibiting trust fund assets from being used for non-trust fund programs" just cracks me up. "People should be able to spend money how they want! Except like that or on things I don't like".
Like hell am I going to be lectured on 'fiscal sanity' by a political party that wants the rich to keep bumming off of people who do not have money for their hard-earned money.
I thought universal meant everyone was entitled it it.
"It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste."
TIL that a middle class family benefiting from the tax dollars they pay for is 'fraud'. Since the rich pay no taxes, they have no right to tell us what to do with our own tax dollars. Simple as. Plus, it's FOOD in the US, we grow so much that NOT diverting some of the extra crops to school lunches is pure waste.
